Scorpio

Funny how modern life is oblivious to creatures that have inspired humans for millennia. People have associated creatures with knowledge, water, moods, fertility and . . . you name it. They weren't just pests; they were tied in with consciousness, including our own. Scorpions, for example, were borrowed to represent one of the twelve archetypes of the zodiac.

We saw our first scorpion in the garage not long after we first moved in. It was my very first. There are no scorpions in Puget Sound, and I don't remember any in Sydney. We killed it and worried about more. Then we found a dead scorpion in the house upon our return after summer on Whidbey. We put it in a jar as a curiosity. Then there was the time Shari blithely picked up a live scorpion in our bedroom closet, like a piece of yarn. She quickly realized her mistake. The scorpion was sluggish. We killed it. A couple of mornings ago, as I was playing solitaire in the living room, a little scorpion dashed across in front of me. I killed it.

But the biggest fellow we ever saw was in the backyard; almost five inches long. It was still alive, but clearly its best days were past. I got some video of it moving, but soon it fell over on its back and that's how it died.

They say the little ones are more poisonous. It was a little one that bit me on a small toe. I didn't realize it at the time. For about a day I thought I had a small, slightly burning sliver in my toe. Then it went away. A couple of days later I found the little scorpion in the dining room, dead. I had stepped on it in my bare feet.

So this is why we fear scorpions? If my personal experience is representative, they are on the same level as honey bees and wasps.

Migration North to South

Evening sun on the south side.

I'm still a snowbird. It's just that I no longer migrate from Whidbey Island to the Old Pueblo. I go from the north side to the south side of the house.

The swimming pool is on the north side. In the summers, there's shade by the house and mornings and evenings to spend in the pool. Meanwhile, the sun on the south side makes stucco and brick radiate heat like an oven. But come the cooler temperatures of autumn and winter, the sun on the south side is where this warm-blooded lizard likes to sit and enjoy the heat

I put my feet up, watch the saguaros and the mesquite trees grow, listen to classical Persian music on my portable music & internet radio device, drink my favorite beverage, and wonder whether I want to trim more agave leaves now or mañana.

See, I'm wearing clothes and socks. We do have seasons. We don't have so much of the brilliant autumn colors of leaves turning orange and red. We just have the same palette of colors in the sunlight.

Why, a couple of weeks ago we had rain overnight. The temperature dropped and when the sun came out, the clouds lifted to reveal the foothills of the Catalina Mountains dusted with snow.

We are getting little snowbird visitors from the north: brilliant yellow finches among them. I wish I was fast enough to take pictures. One morning about a week ago there were about eight sitting on branches by the side of our San Simeon street.

The Money in Politics

Presidents Booed, Pizzas Are Vegetables, & Occupying Money

An article on Huffington Post, that website full of news entertainment for the liberal-minded, reports that Congress overruled the USDA and declared frozen pizza a vegetable for the purposes of school children's diet.  Corporate food manufacturers make no money off of fresh fruit and vegetables. They make money off of pre-packed, adulterated foods -- and off of politicians eager for campaign donations.

Protesters occupy Wall Street and other public areas in cities throughout the country. They are angry at the rich, but not particularly well organized, like the wealthy can afford to be.

The wealthy buy propaganda, conservative talk shows and Republican talking points that make Johnny Machine-head boo Michelle Obama and Jill Biden at a NASCAR race. This is patriotism?  To boo the wives of the President and Vice-President promoting an initiative to hire veterans? Where do people get these knee-jerk, hypocritical reactions?

Corporate media. Some conservative; some liberal; but all designed to be popular entertainment that serves to influence and bias instead of inform and educate.

Shari points out that Gaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years by keeping the institutions of government weak and ineffective. As one commentator noted, "Libya, under the elder Gadhafi's 42-year rule, had intentionally weak state institutions and a government that barely existed. Gadhafi, who held no title, had ultimate authority and did not want the development of any other power centers that might challenge him."

Our conservative friends in this county argue that we are safer with a weak and small government. Excuse me? Where do people get such palpably stupid ideas? Propaganda.

The problem isn't that the rich are rich. It's that money drives politics. Don't bother occupying Wall Street unless you occupy the government.

The only way for ordinary citizens to control their own government is to take money out of it. Right now, we are ensuring that we have a government of the money, by the money, for the money. As a nation, a society, and a community, we are confronted by plenty of serious policy decisions. Why are we invariably and unduly influenced towards the alternatives that enrich a few?

Tucson Autumn

Tucson has its seasons. Gone are the temperatures of the three digit days. It actually gets cool at night.

But for our swimming pool solar blanket, swimming would have become quick dipping some weeks ago. Yesterday, the last day of October, the cement pond was down to 81 degrees. Still great for me, but Shari has finally surrendered. This photo was taken two days earlier.

With cooler weather, Shari set up a painting area underneath the fan outside our bedroom. The breeze keeps the mozzies at bay and it still gets hot; in the eighties. Yes folks, we have the occasional lost but irritating mosquito. She is working to complete a painting of Baboquivari and the man in the maze.

Flowers still bloom, goldfish still swim, and the citrus tree which suffered from last winter's freeze has one fruit getting bigger, and several fertilized blossoms turning into teeny-tiny round green things.

But maybe the main reason for this entry is a great sunrise photo that Shari took a few mornings ago.

A neighbor and friend joined us for dinner a couple of nights back. She is much our senior in terms of time spent living in Tucson. She admitted that she never tires of seeing the mountains and the colors. Each time it's different.

Even though I've been here only a few years, I can relate.

Red on Buff

My introduction to the Hohokam motivated us to visit the Arizona State Museum on the campus of the UofA. Shari and I had been there once before several years back. Now we wanted to look at the distinctive Hohokam red on buff pottery.

The museum boasts over 20,000 whole vessels, the world's largest collection of Southwest Indian pottery, but only a tiny sample is on public display. We'd forgotten that the public exhibit is small. There is something about being stuck in a museum which makes it tough to relate to an object.

From the one public room, through a mostly glass wall, one can see into the climate-controlled storage room with racks and racks of pots, plates and figures. That looked intriguing. Neatly organized centuries and millennia.

The public display includes a wall with examples of all kinds of pottery from the various cultures that flourished in the Southwest and northern Mexico. There is an impressive display of photographs of that wall at the museum website. You can see the entire wall, each column, each shelf, and each piece.

The other side of the public area has a display entitled "Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest," beginning with the Seri, Tarahumara and Yaqui who are in Mexico. Which raises the odd fact that the U.S.-Mexico border cuts across land traversed by many a people and culture over millennia, including today.

Being confronted with such a great diversity of cultures and languages, I thought of a native language map of the Americas that I saw in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City: scores and scores of languages quite unrelated to each other, making Europe and Asia look quite homogenous.

Somewhere in that museum were samples of artifacts from different cultures in Mexico, among them a culture around Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico, possibly related to the Mogollan cultures, that flourished about the same time as the Hohokam, a connection between Arizona and the Toltec-Aztec polities in the Mexico City area. Curious. Like the Hohokam, the Casas Grandes culture mysteriously disappeared around 1450. So was it before Columbus, or were they killed off after European diseases struck?

We Europeans live in a continent where populations, cultures and technology flourished equal to any in the Old World. Sadly, we have little awareness of the old spirits.